On 10/7/20, Hendrik Boom hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 06:59:11PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 6:49 PM Hendrik Boom hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
If you want Mate and do not want systemd, you could start with Devuan and install mate as a package.
the downside of devuan is how far they diverged from debian (global search/replace debian on *everything*). this means that if you want to use debian/testing - say you are a developer and that makes debian/testing absolutely essential - you're absolutely screwed because the small devuan team absolutely do not have the resources to keep the entire debian/testing repo converted and rebuilt absolutely every single day 24x7 with the "global/search/replace" system they created.
if they had done it as an "add-on" to the debian repository it would have been fine, but the fact that they chose a "backlash" path meant that they've completely isolated themselves and their community from the rest of debian.
Yes, it is a small team. The way their repository works is to contain only packages that they had to modify because of systemd dependency. For the rest, they do a network-level redirect (possibly an http redirect) to the Debian repositories.
this is really neat... except they fail to keep up-to-date with testing, unstable, experimental and volatile packages in the bits that they do not "redirect".
So for those packages, Devuan is automatically as up-to-date as Debian.
try adding debian/testing on a spare devuan machine with a huge amount of software packages including qt5-dev, xlibs-dev, python-dev and many more which are perfectly normal for an experienced developer to have, and do an apt-get dist-upgrade.
you will immediately see the extent of the problem that devuan have created for themselves.
l.